


Venerate the Saint of Lost Causes (He May Speak a Truth but Once)

by navaan



Category: DC Extended Universe, Justice League (2017)
Genre: Gen, Gen Work, Ghosts, Haunting, Hellblazer Fusion (Sort of), Horror Elements, Magic, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-30
Updated: 2020-08-30
Packaged: 2021-03-06 21:08:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,208
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26035417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/navaan/pseuds/navaan
Summary: After she touched a demonic artifact, Diana has a problem and she knows someone who might be able to help her solve it.
Relationships: Diana (Wonder Woman) & John Constantine
Comments: 12
Kudos: 18
Collections: Fifth DCEU Fanworks Exchange





	Venerate the Saint of Lost Causes (He May Speak a Truth but Once)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



During her childhood back on Themyscira, she’d been brought up a warrior, daughter of the Amazon queen, the only child in a society of grown women. Discovering her power and destiny had been a journey. Discovering her own heritage, her true origin and why it had been kept from her had only been part of that journey that had led here - to a world she could make a better place by example.

She’d been the daughter of a mother’s love, of a woman’s desperate wish for a daughter, a daughter made of sand and clay given life by magic.

It had been a beautiful story to hear growing up.

The truth she now knew was no less complicated. 

She was the daughter of Zeus, a demi-goddess, _godess_ in her own right -- and yet she would always be Diana, daughter of Hippolyta, an Amazon princess. Even now, fighting among heroes who were only growing into their power, she never forgot who and what she was and what duties came with it.

Today’s events had reminded her of both sides of her heritage. The thing had called her _goddess warrior._

“So,” Barry asked and grinned at her in their new Hall of Justice, that Bruce had built for them -- molded from the ashes of his childhood home -- “how old are you exactly?”

His head was cocked in momentary contemplation, before he caught Clark’s raised eyebrows and Victor’s exasperated expression. Then he rushed out an apology: “I’m sorry. That’s not something you ask women -- I mean anyone, girls, boys, adults, old people… Shutting up now.”

His flustered silence brought a smile to her lips. Catapulting himself too fast into an awkward situation was so like Flash. “I don’t think what happened today had anything to do with my age, Barry,” she said. 

“What was it,” Bruce asked, “that happened today?”

Diana leaned back in her chain and thought it through, before throwing a swift look into Arthur’s direction. He had seen the recordings of what had happened in London this morning and she had asked him to consult the Atlantean savants.

“I can’t explain it,” she admitted. “It looked like a parademon, something born of Apokolips.”

“It screeched like one too,” Arthur added and shrugged, aware that everyone at this table knew what he meant.

The golden lasso of truth was resting on Diana’s knee and she let her finger run along it, as if compelled by its power. She knew her friends would believe her even without it. “It carried a weapon of some kind. A club made of silver or steel. Metal that felt like cold fire when I touched it to wrestle it from its clawed hands. Ice that burned. Like magic of some kind.”

The moment she had touched it, an ear shattering shriek had sounded -- not from the creature but from the metal itself and then the club had shattered into a thousand pieces like glass. 

Diana could have sworn the winged creature had grinned at her then, before it had melted before her eyes muttering muffled words of proto-Greek nobody spoke in this age. 

Then the shards had pierced her skin.

The cuts still stung even though they had healed up immediately.

“That’s it?” Victor asked and she knew he was replaying the different recordings behind her on the varied screens that lined the wall so that the rest of the League could see what had happened.

“It’s a new para-demon, one that’s slightly different than the ones we’ve catalogued.” Bruce eyes were darting between the screens.

Clark folded his arms in front of his chest and nodded. He always looked a little sterner when he wore the full Superman costume. “Something about it seems different. Demonic,” he said.

It was the kind of comment the other’s would occasionally poke friendly fun at, but not even Bruce seemed to think it worth to roll his eyes at Clark today. 

Demonic. 

A shiver went down Diana’s spine. She remembered stories of Ares, not knowing he was her brother, not knowing he was a more cunning evil than the stories revealed. But not even he had been _demonic_ \- a crazy god, maybe, but not a demon. Some of his minions, his human helpers had earned the descriptor. It had taken Diana years to learn how true a descriptor it could be for some worshippers of the underworld beyond Hades. 

“There,” Victor said. He was still focusing on the recording. 

Diana turned to see what scene he was replaying.

It was the moment the metal thing had shattered.

“What are the markings on it?” Flash asked, earning a look from the rest of the room. “There,” he said and pointed too quickly for them to follow. “Slow it down,” he suggested with a shrug.

Victor slowed it down for them and sure enough there were symbols across the side of the baseball bat shaped weapon. She could only get a glimpse of them before it flew into pieces and she could have sworn she saw the creature’s eyes glow a bright silver before it happened. 

But her attention didn’t remain on the frozen image that Victor tried to enhance for her and the rest of the room.

Behind the screens she caught movement. Mist. Silvery fog.

Then there she was: Her hair woven into thin braids and falling across her back, a piercing adorning her nose. She looked right at Diana, but nobody else reacted when the ghostly figure stepped right through the screens and into the middle of the room.

“It’s like there’s black smoke rising from the thing,” Arthur remarked at that moment, even though for Diana the view was half obscured by the swirling silver of the opaque form of their ghostly visitor.

Bruce looked intrigued. “More like the creature dissipates into dust.”

Had he seen something like it before?

“The shards cut deep,” Clark remarked and then looked at her. “Are you alright, Diana?”

“I am healed,” she said and held his gaze, showing him her now unmarked arms, “but…” She paused and the ghostly woman made a step towards her, eyes sad. “Since it happened… I’ve been seeing things.”

The room fell silent. Everyone was staring.

“What kind of things?”

She sighed. She would ask to be screened for toxins. Make sure her suspicions were right and this wasn’t Apokolips at work at all. 

Deep in her bones she already knew that there was another kind of power at work. Something old and made of darkness. 

Arthur had been uncharacteristically quiet for the whole time and when their eyes met across the huge mahogany table, she knew he was thinking the same thing.

This was magic, dark sorcery, or something more evil than that.

She could only hope Atlantis had records that would help them figure it out.

* * *

_Three weeks later_

Her dreams had been filled with screeching screams, cries for help -- an hourglass shattering over and over again, black sand covered her before the glass drilled itself into her flesh leaving a mark. She could see herself over and over again - a shard in her eye, a shard reaching her heart, leaving her bleeding out in the dark and empty dreamscape.

In the dream her skin lit with the markings she’d seen on the metal club - before her eyes the old Assyrian words took shape : _Night Monster_.

Ghost walked around her, forming a circle, humming to themselves in prayer.

A three faced goddess smiled at her and laughed. _A goddess_ , she laughed. _Worthy of the Rising Darkness._

She tried to scream, tried to rage, but no sound escaped her lips, darkness closing in around her while the glass shards turned into liquid fire, burning her from the inside out with icy cold inferno.

She woke from the dream, the sheets tangled around her, drenched in her own sweat, ghosts still visible walking in circles around her bed. But only the young woman ever stepped out of the shapelessness into true form to watch her with that eerie stare.

Diana held her gaze. 

“Who are you?” she asked and no longer expected an answer. Together they watched the other shapes dissipate until there was only Diana and this one ghost, leaving her to wonder if the other revenants had ever been there. 

“Why are your ghost friends performing a ritual?”

A ritual focused on Diana, every night.

The girl-ghost shrugged. She hadn’t spoken one syllable and Diana wasn’t entirely sure it was because she couldn’t speak and not because Diana lacked the skill to _hear_. 

But the longer she sat there in her bed, watching the pale ghost focusing all her attention on Diana, the more she thought this had to end.

Whatever it was -- the three faced goddess Hecate, a demon made of glass or a specter of a girl -- the Rising Darkness had to let go of her.

Atlantis had not provided any answers.

It was time to find her own.

As if the girl-ghost had heard her thoughts, she vanished through a wall and didn’t return for the rest of the day.

Answers. She knew where to find answers about dark sorcery.

* * *

Every step sounded loudly across the street, her heeled boots not made for stealth tonight, but competing her balck leather outfit, consisting of pants and a biker jacket.

The pub she was walking towards wasn’t the kind of place she frequented -- although it had that charming whiff of the “old times” that reminded her of her first venture into this world of men. 

She hadn’t even reached the door yet, when someone cleared their throat in the shadows beside her.

“John,” she said without turning around. She had come to seek John Constantine and wasn’t surprised that he had found her before she could end her search.

The man clicked his tongue. “Fancy meeting you here. Our very own Princess Di, ey? Can you pick me out by the sound of my steps?”

“The smell of stale smoke and beer gave you away,” she said without a note of accusation. She turned to face him, not surprised to see him leaning against a wall, a lit cigarette dangling from his lips. “These things will kill you, you know that.”

He waved the cigarette around, holding it loosely between two fingers. “Been there, done that, love, lived to tell the cancerous tale and the happily ever fucking after,” he said in the John Constantine style of bored ostentation. “You’re looking for me?”

“If Zatara was still alive…”

“Oh, he _isn’t_ , old cod,” John said and narrowed his eyes. “Burned to a crisp that one. This what this is about? Revenging an old friend? He knew we were playing with fire. Don’t blame it on me.”

Diana only knew rumours, but she had never known Zatara to be one who went into a battle unprepared.. “I’m sure he knew what he was playing with. Did his daughter?”

They both knew why Diana couldn’t find Zatanna Zatara. The sorceress was mourning her father. And whatever occult machinations had killed _him_ , John Constantine had had his part to play in it.

John didn’t flinch at the mention of the daughter, met Diana’s gaze headon, and then put the cigarette between his lips and drew a deep breath - until grey tendrils of smoke broke their way from his nostrils, swirling up. He didn’t cough, but blew the smoke out right into her direction forming perfect rings. 

“What is it you want, Di?”

“Diana,” she corrected and for the first time noticed the young woman with short Afto hair leaning against a car opposite of them, watching their every move. She was tall, as tall maybe as Phillipus and she was grinning. She caught Diana staring right away and to her surprise picked up a notebook, scribbled in big letters: “YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL.” She held it out for Diana to see, with a twinkle in her eyes.

“No flattery,” John admonished the girl. “She’s with me,” he then informed Diana. “Meet, Zed. She’s the new Chaz. Can’t...”

Diana narrowed her eyes. Then told Zed: “Don’t mind him. I am Diana.” Her hands accompanied the words with sign language. The girl smiled and signed back.

“What’s that?” 

Apparently she was carrying the writing equipment on John’s behalf. It would be so like him to learn Arameic and Enochian but fail to communicate with someone he’d chosen as aid or apprentice. 

“Pleasure to meet you too,” Diana said to Zed before she turned back to John. “I need your help or I wouldn’t be here.”

“You must be very desperate if you come to me, Wonder Woman. I get involved and we know how it ends.”

“Yes, usually not so well for anyone but you,” she said and looked at the wall. Her ghost had just stepped right out of the bricks to John’s left. 

“Ah,” he said and looked at her ghostly companion, noticing her right away, and then over at Diana. It was hard to tell what he had caught by looking from one to the other, but his stance changed slightly. “Are you alright?”

“Would I have come to you if I were alright?” Diana asked, feeling the child of the cold flame eating away at her a little more every day.

* * *

John Contantine had a bad reputation even among those who dabbled in the darker forms of magic and from what Diana remembered of a much younger John, much of it was earned. He was a con man, a trickster. He got by, drifting from one place to another, always ending back up in London or New York, always turning up where there was trouble -- or followed by it. 

Occult circles had opened a world of power to him and as a boy drunk on power he’d fallen into that rabbit hole with a one way street sign without thinking of the consequences. Consequences had earned him a two year long stay at the Ravenscar Secure Facility, after an exorcism had ended it murder.

That was all she knew. But she had seen John work his magic, knew he wasn’t _just_ a fraud, not only a dabbler.

He was giving her ghost the onceover.

“Know her?”

“She’s been following me for a few weeks, but that’s not what you mean? No, I don’t know who she was in life.”

The girl-ghost looked at her with the same blank expression she always wore.

“That’s where we start then,” John said. “And I just know how to figure it out.”

* * *

Bruce would have run a picture through all databases available to him, do detective work and call in favors… John, well, John had other means to figure things out.

“Let’s take a look then,” he said and made Diana step into the magic circle he had painted with red crayons onto the wooden floorboards of a messy hotel room. 

“You’re not even asking me to undress?” she asked, used to him playing up the crude, macho persona when he wanted to be at his most off-putting and gauche. “It must be serious.”

“You never know,” John said vaguely. “There are ghosts around you, Diana. A crowd of spirits. And that’s never a good sign. You’re marked with magic. And you don’t get marked for nothing. Someone marked you for something.”

“Marked?” She thought about the dreams she’d had of the hourglass shattering, the glass embedding itself in her, writing the word _Rising Darkness_ into her skin, the sand flying around her, suffocating her until she couldn’t even draw breath anymore. 

She closed her eyes and stepped into the circle. She needed to know.

When she opened her eyes the ghost stood at the other side of the circle and stared at her.

“Hello there,” John said. “A little haunting? Always fun, love. What’s your problem? Violent death? Fella did you in?”

The ghost's gaze was drawn from Diana. She looked at John who was in the process of folding up his trench coat to put it aside. He pulled up his sleeves, ready to get down to business. 

“Yeah, you love. I’m talking to you. What’s your story?”

The ghost stretched out one hand and pointed towards Diana. 

“She’s been around me since that day.” She had given John the whole story, left our no details, before he’d finally found them this room and started his ritual. 

“Talked?”

Diana shook her head. “Would it be better if I also heard ghostly voices?”

“Maybe,” John said and grinned. “The chatty ones often just want to get something off their chests. Or well some can get right out nasty…” His arms were bare now and when he started a chant, two halves of a pentagram, tattooed into his skin, started glowing where before there had only been unmarked flesh. 

“You can step out of the circle now, by the way.”

Diana blonked, surprised. “That’s all?”

She stepped out, the ghost tried to follow but couldn’t cross the line. She looked at Diana sadly, with more emotion than she’d shown all this time.

Then she said in a clear voice: “The demon, the demon who melted away. It was me.”

“You?” Even after a century among humans, the world could still surprise her.

“What happened?” John asked, pragmatic. 

“The Cold Flame. Brian.. I loved him so much, but… he was…”

“Cold Flame,” John repeated.

A shiver ran down Diana’s spine and she remembered the silvery fires that felt like ice, the shards piercing her skin. “What does that mean? What’s the Cold Flame?”

“Not what,” John said. “Who. Good for nothing cult of bloody wankers. Were obsessed for a while with becoming gods, ruling us all with magic. Zatara never told you? Just like him to leave that out.”

Diana shook her head. John was implying that Zatara should have told her, but Diana and the magician had never been close. They’d had found their interests aligned on more than one occasion, after all where gods and myths were involved so was magic. But at no point in his life had she felt obligated to him or felt he owed her explanations for what he was involved in. 

Despite what people may be thinkog about a demigodess who had been born and raised on a mystical island among immortal warrior women, magic was not her area of expretise. 

The ghost was staring at her, face showing signs of distress.

“Brian,” she wailed, and her voice became an angry storm, a cry of anguish. The room shook, objects started moving, rattling about, picked up by the power of grief.

Diana ducked when a desk lamp flew over her head, the few movable objects in the room ripped away by an unearthly whilwind.

“Forget that ponce, love,” John said calmly. Nothing seemed to touch him. “Just another man who went to far. What did he do? Trap you in that metal? Curse you to haunt anyone touched by it.”

The ghost cried, her scream loud enough to make the window panes shacke.

John started muttering Lating phrases under his beath. 

Diana ignored it complely. She stepped forward and held out a hand towards the specter that with her crieds tears had started to loose form and hang in the air like the wailing picture of emotion bleeding into fog.

 _That_ Diana understood. The power of a tempest, the power of grief, love and hate mixed into each other. 

“What’s your name?” she asked.

The terrible wail hurt in her ears and drowned out her words.

She wasn’t deterrred. “What’s your name?”

The ghosts eyes darted to hers, the body took shape again slowly, as if forgetting the outburst when asked a simple question. The answer didn’t come as easily as the name of her lover.

“Angelica,” she whispered. “Angelica Unah.”

“It’s nice to finally be able to speak to you, sister,” Diana said and inclined her head. 

Beside her John huffed. 

“You’re Wonder Woman. I saw you.”

“I am Diana,” she corrected. “Can you tell me what happened to you?”

Angelica stared, her mouth opened into a round o-shape that looked like a dark unnatural voice.

“She wants to know how you died, love,” John added when the ghost seemed frozen.

Diana frowned at him.

But it was enough to prompt Angelica. 

“He killed me. With that thing. He let me bleed out out in that storage unit… I thought it was all a joke. The cauldron, the magical artifeacts. All a joke…”

She wailed again, face bleeding into thick tears that took all contours with them. 

“Where?” John asked. “Tell me, and I’ll make sure you’re set free.”

The ghost looked at him as if she was seeing him for the first time, her eyes the deep black. “A room full of artifacts. Cold Flame. He wanted to impress the cold flame. Something about books, a boy, a gateway… Unleashing the Rising Darkness.”

“Where?” John asked and Diana had the uncomfortable feeling he knew what she was talking about. 

“I can show you,” the ghosts said.

John only nodded. With one foot he broke the lines of the red circle, smudging the chalk arcoss the floorboards.

The ghost stepped out.

“I think I know what this is all about,” he said and watched Angelica walk right through the door, grabbing his coat to follow her before she could slip too far away. “The Cold Flame, the boy and the gateway. It’s an odd prohesy about the greatest sorcerer of them all. For years they’ve been gathering tools, trying to find the books of magic, making sure they would be the ones in power…”

“That sounds like all the megalomaniacs I’ve ever faced from Areas to Luthor.”

“Not this time, love,” John said and they were running out onto the street to see their ghost slipping along the sidewalk. “They’re tapping into something darrk. A demon older than hell itself.”

“That Rising Darkness?” Her skin itched even speaking the name. The words were itched into her skin and she could feel them.

“One and the same,” John said and for the first time, all the calm had given way to urgency. It was never good when John Constantine looked worried.

* * *

The ghost led them to a warehouse and slipped through the walls without slowing.

John made short work of the heavily padded lock before Diana could even offer to break the chains with her hands. 

“You do this often?”

He shrugged. “When needs must.”

“Of course,” she said, aware that he had no moral qualms when it came to petty thievery. 

“Smells burned,” he noted, stepping in. 

There was the lingering smell of fire, charcoal. The smell often reminded her of the fires burning in braziers across Themyscira at night. In the entrance of a warehouse where a young woman may have lost her life, the memory wasn’t as comforting.

They moved along to the back of the warehouse following the ghost, passing containers and storage units to find another locked door. She pushed it open easily before John could open it. The metal door fell inwards, revealing a huge space that had been adorned with furniture and a cozy worn sofa. It looked like a messy apartment, like someone had lived here for years on end. 

John took in a breath. His eyes wandered across the assortment of items that lined the walls. To Diana it looked like the disorganization, but John walked straight to the shelves on the left. “This must be half of Winter’s collection. How the hell did a no-name magic dabbler get his hands on all this?”

It looked like mundane things to Diana. 

Angelica’s ghost came to a halt in the middle of the room, right in front of the sofa. 

Diana followed her carefully, noted the carpet under her boots and then stopped. 

“John,” she said. It took a moment until he realized she'd spoken to him and sauntered over.

Dried blood formed a circle in front of the sofa to her untrained eye seemed no different from the one John had drawn with red chalk to hold the ghost and make her speak. 

But that wasn’t what had gripped Diana’s attention.

Two burned bodies lay, intertwined on the sofa. PArt of the cushions had caught fire, the padding was only charred. As if the fire had been contained to one spot only, like the fire hadn’t crawled away from the bodies.

“Hmm,” he said as if this wasn’t a grizzly sight.

Angelica stood in the middle of the circle as if she’d been compelled to go there. Her pale gray eyes of smoke were trained on the charred bodies. Diana could still make out her hair adornments, a bracelet, things the ghost still manifested in her shape. There was no doubt that this was Angelica.

John crouched down in front of the sofa to get a better look, and clicked his tongue. 

“Brian, Brian, Brian,” he said, “you utter idiot. What did you get involved in this time?”

“You know him?” Diana asked, surprised. 

“That would be overstating the matter,” John answered and sniffed. “Sold him that watch,” he said and pointed at the charred corpse's wrist. “Told him it was charmed to protect the owner from evil spirits.”

“Told him.”

“I lied,” John admitted without a hint of remorse. “Bad week. Bookies didn’t take any bets from me and I needed money to pay me rent, love. Idiot wants to buy a protective charm, he gets it.”

“Didn’t protect him.,” she pointed out. 

“Ah, but that's not on me.” John turned without coming out of the crouch to look around. “He was trying to impress someone else. He was a neo pagan hipster hoarder. Look around. Everyone here knew he was gathering whatever magic shit he could find, but he wasn’t much of a sorcerer. He was one of the meddlers. Thought he could buy into the power if he just found the right instrument to play. He was an easy mark for…”

“You?”

“Con men.” John grinned, wearing the title like his trench coat.

“And that cult?”

He swayed a bit on the ball of his feet and nodded. “All cults know how to target the needy. Make the right pitch, sell you on their glorious goals. Works best when the poor sucker doesn’t know the price tag before he pays.”

John shrugged. 

“Brian,” Angelica’s ghost whispered sadly, seemingly unconcerned with the evidence of her own death.

“You knew how to pick ‘em, huh?” John asked. 

Diana wanted to smack him, but it wouldn’t help her or Angelica. 

“They unleashed the demon I fought?” 

“Someone did,” John agreed. His eyes had fixed on the circle. Diana wasn’t sure how she hadn’t seen it before, but there under Angelica’s ghostly feet lay a dagger with the traditional ceremonial hilt lying on top of the thick leather of an old book. She’d seen the type of dagger in countless ceremonies and she knew this one without ever having seen it before. It had been depicted in countless drawings and depictions. 

“Hecate’s blade,” she said.

“Is this where you come in,” John asked and peered up at her.

“They say she made it from magic and moonlight to cut herself into three parts.”

“Waying, full and waning moon,” John said. He nodded, as if any of this was obvious. “How do you know it’s real?”

It was calling to her with an icy breath, a voice that wasn’t there. She knew it wanted to be in her hand. 

“I just do,” she said. 

He spun around on his heels, took a better look at the circle, the ghost, the bodies, the messy collection of things around them. “I think I know what is going on. The cold flame summoned something.”

“The Rising Darkness.”

“Let’s call it that,” John agreed. “The demon was set free.”

“The thing I fought?”

John nodded gravely.

“Now what?” 

“We need to send her on,” he pointed at Angelica, “let her rest. Should solve your little nightmare problem.”

“That’s all? How do I do it?” She was willing to help put the soul at rest. She could live with dreams of ghosts and icy cold flames, but not with the idea of this poor soul condemned for loving a murderous fool. 

He reached out a hand as if he was feeling around for something and even beneath the trenchcoat she could see his tattoos glowing. 

“Pick up the book and dagger,” he instructed, then threw a look over his shoulder at her body, his eyes were glazing over.

“I have already started the ritual. She’ll need to see the items and her body and she’ll know…”

Magic, Diana knew, had its own set of rules.

“Let me talk to her,” she said.

“Be my guest,” he said and waved at the ghost with open palms.

When Diana called her by name, the ghost turned to look at her. “You’re Wonder Woman,” she said with an awed expression. “I know you.”

“Diana,” she reminded the spectre who did not seem to remember their previous conversation. “I want to help you Angelica. It’s so sad what happened to you.”

Angelica nodded. “Brian,” she said. “He was here with me. Where’s Brian?”

Diana’s throat tightened. The grief echoed in her, brought up memories of Ares, of war, of losing Steve, watching friends age and die. 

Angelica held out a hand and Diana reached out, knowing she couldn’t really touch what was no longer bound by the constraints of the physical world.

The touch was like a breeze, a freezing touch of cold finger, and despite her strength she felt herself stumble - into the circle.

The ghost’s face changed to liquid fire. “You, you, you,” she said. “You have stolen the darkness, stolen the fire. It’s mine, mine, mine.”

“John,” she called out, her arms coming up to defend herself with her bracers. 

“Release the darkness,” the ghost shreaked. “The great evil needs to walk again.”

The dagger rose in hands that weren’t there. Diana stopped the blade with her bracers easily, but when she tried to step out of the circle she realized she could step out.

“John?”

“Sorry,” he said, “working on it.”

He started a chant of muffled words under his breath. Diana knew the Latin, she also caught the words of old Arameic that John pronounced with a British accent that made them hard to follow and seemed out of place mixed in with the old Greek he wove into it. She had seen and heard him weave spells before, back when he’d still been a punk kid, trying to write his own lyrics. This was different. He was adapting this from sources as he was going, calling to the entity beyond the veil, calling to the Rising Darkness and the afterlife to make itself known. 

Diana was about to object, ask what he was calling when the ghost’s face froze in a silent scream. No longer did it look like a Fury about to kill Diana in a ghostly rage.

Then Diana lost all control of her body.

It was not her voice coming from her mouth when she spoke: “Puny sorcerer, you dare command me, the Great Evil, Rising Darkness, daughter of Lilith?” 

“I command thee, demon. Whatever hotshot you are in the underworld leave this woman!”

Diana screamed. Her voice sounded eerie -- Diana’s tones mixed with a demonic baritone, honeyd ice and fire darkness made music. Words bubbled out of her that were not a language she’d ever spoken.

“Enochian, ey? Don’t sweet talk me, great evil. Leave the body that’s not yours.”

Diana spun on her heels, the ghost beside her screeched, became smoke and stopped right into her as if she wanted to become one.

The floor vanished beneath Diana’s feet, leaving only a dark plane of nothingness behind. 

She screamed again. 

“Good,” John’s voice said. “You’re fighting.”

“John?” she called out before she saw him, standing there, just feet away, hem of the trenchcoat swirling through the nothingness as if it was made of powder or sand. 

She reached for him, but the icy cold in her was faster and spat words in that same old language again. Lightning split the darkness apart. It smelled of ozone and decay. 

John just stood there.

“Is Brian still in there? Is Angelica?”

“Their bodies could not hold me. Burned them to ashes. The priest could hold me for a time.”

“Ménage à Trois? How lovely. They called you?”

Diana realized that the demon's body she had fought had been made from charred flesh like the others. The cold flame priest had set this into motion and then received more than he’d bargained for. 

“They thought so,” the demon spoke through Diana. “I called them to me. The cold flame. They want what’s in the circle. My metal, my blade. The book.”

“But you want a body? A way out.”

“I _have_ a body. A body of a god. The body the cold flame wants. They want to be gods…”

Diana stumbled, gritted her teeths, and refused to speak one more word.

“You too want the book,” the demon's voice broke out of her. “Let me have this vessel. You can have the trinkets.”

“Books of Magic are not trinkets,” John said gravely and gave Diana a somewhat pitying look. Anger fueled her spirit when she realized he might just make this deal to take the power he had seen that Diana had failed to recognize. 

“Sorry,” he said and he was by her side suddenly, grinning. 

“John, you…” her own voice broke out of her, before the darkness drowned her out again. “Have to burn out the light, have to burn her out of the vessel, carve out a room for myself,” the demon muttered.

“Easier if you let me have this,” John said, and he did not grab for the book, but suddenly his hand was on her lasso.

The demon screeched. “Speak,” John commanded, even before Diana realized she had reflexively grabbed hold of the lasso too, intertwining their hands in the golden thread. 

“John, I swear, you are the most devious…” Diana started, but she couldn’t get further. 

He kissed her - deep, surprising, tasting of stale cigarette smoke and mint.

His hand was still touching the lasso when he said. “I knew you could beat it. I knew you could get me into the circle. Now tell me what beats darkness.”

“Love,” she answered without a moment's hesitation, without a single moment of regret. “Love.”

Love was her mother, love were her sisters, Steve Trevor’s smile when they danced. Love was Clark coming back to life, Bruce building them a Hall of Justice, Arthut trying to be the king he was meant to be -- and John Constantine when he looked at her with honesty, when he put a way the mask of the two-faced trickster and let himself care, reminding her of the truth of her existence. Suddenly the anger was gone and she felt nothing but love. It drove the shards of glass-metal of her dream from her body. The club shaped container formed in her hand.

“No,” the demonic voice screamed right from Diana’s body, but with the scream smoke bled from Diana’s eyes, from her mouth, out her ears and vanished right into the container. 

Then darkness engulfed her.

* * *

She woke in the circle. 

Angelica’s ghos sat beside her, knees drawn up. 

“It was in me?” she asked, turning onto her back and making sure there were no more markings on her arms.

“Body of an immortal goddess,” Angelica said softly. “Demon couldn’t resist it. Brian was such an idiot. When I realized what he was doing I tried to stop him, but… I was such an idiot too. Thank you, Diana. I’m free now.”

For the first time the ghost smiled. 

“Rest well, sister,” Diana said, watched the ghost get to her feet and walk away towards a window, becoming more translucent with every step.

There was no sign of John - or the metal container that now housed a demonic soul again.

The dagger of Hecate still tested on top of the tome by her side. 

A sticky note had been attached to it. 

“I have no use for any Book of Magic. Throw them in the bin when you leave or collect the whole series. Choice is yours.”

“Very funny, John,” Diana muttered but felt a grin touch her lips. 

There was still the matter of the thing John had taken away from the scene. But she felt lighter. Freeer. As if that darkness that had clouded her soul since that fight had lifted.

“You owe me,” was scribbled on the back of the note. 

“Ha,” she said, and realized John may have guided her here - to get an artifact he wanted, to actually help, who knew? - bit it had been her own strength that had saved her. 

She picked up the book and dagger. There were people waiting for her in Gotham and life, magic and sooner rather than later Diana would all catch up with John Constantine -- and they would see who would be collecting debts then. He had been a last resort, but he was a better man than even he himself knew. One day, she'd make him see that part of himself.


End file.
